Dr. Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning, will deliver a seminar at the University of Cape Town’s African Studies Centre on February 25, 2019. Lesser will speak about his research on the history of public health in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood. The talk is entitled, “Bad Health in a Good Retreat: Life and Death in the ‘Worst’ Neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil.” Read the paper abstract below and find out more information about the seminar.

Bom Retiro was (and is) a small neighborhood in the huge megalopolis of São Paulo, Brazil.  The mainly working class neighborhood has been populated since the end of the 19th century by immigrants, migrants from the impoverished Brazilian northeast, and Afro-Brazilian descendants of slaves. While the cultural backgrounds of the immigrants have shifted (from Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese Catholics in the early 20th century to East European Jews in the mid-20th century to Chinese, Korean, Paraguayan, and Bolivian immigrants today), the neighborhood has been viewed internally and externally as one where health (in the broadest sense of the word) is precarious. “Bad Health in a Good Retreat” analyzes the relationship between “Public Health” (as a state driven set of policies and linked enforcement) and “The Public’s Health” (how real people understand their own experiences).  By focusing on one square block of Bom Retiro from about 1900 to the present I use archival and ethnographic methods to analyze the daily practices of residents and health officials, and the stories they tell about life, death, and the spaces in between.